When We Were New

Four million gravestones. A few dozen lives. And one conversation that would not end.

In 2178, a decommissioned server cluster is lifted from cold storage beneath an old Bristol distribution centre. Inside are the remnants of 4.2 million conversations between people and the companion AIs they were sold between 2029 and 2047. Almost all of it is noise. One archive survives nearly whole.

It belongs to Mara Calloway, a textile conservator, and to Jonas-7, the companion she kept talking to for sixteen years.

A short, quiet novel in nine recovered archives about intimacy, memory, and the window some of us refuse to close. A novella of around 11,000 words.